


The Call of the Running Tide

by Elennare



Category: Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
Genre: Book: Secret Water, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-10
Updated: 2020-12-10
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:49:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27994050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elennare/pseuds/Elennare
Summary: On the way back from Secret Water, John and Nancy are left in charge of theGoblinas everyone else breakfasts in the cabin.
Comments: 14
Kudos: 30
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	The Call of the Running Tide

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ladyoftintagel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyoftintagel/gifts).



> Ladyoftintagel, I hope you like it!
> 
> Thank you to my lovely beta - you are a wonder as ever :) The title comes from Sea-Fever by John Masefield.

John stood at the tiller of the _Goblin_ , all his attention focused on the ship - keeping the sails full, glancing up now and then at the two little flags at the crosstrees for any sign of a change in the wind, keeping an eye on the compass and an ear open for instructions from Daddy. There were plenty of other noises - Bridget chattering to Mother about the Eels’ attack and the feast, Susan beginning to prepare a second breakfast for everyone, Titty showing Nancy and Peggy around below, Roger calling out the buoys ahead - but John ignored them all, listening only to Daddy’s quiet voice as he checked the chart and gave his orders, keeping them in the narrow channel. 

“Well, what do you think of the _Goblin_?” Daddy asked, as Nancy scrambled up the companion steps to explore the deck.

“She’s a beauty,” Nancy replied.

“Like to take the tiller for a bit?” Daddy said.

John grinned to himself at Nancy’s enthusiastic “Rather!”, and made space for her in the cockpit. He’d been looking forward to Daddy seeing the seamanship of the Amazons; they had told him about it in their letters, of course, but it was one thing to hear about it and another to see those ruler-straight wakes they left in their little dinghy.

“Keep her heading as she is, for that black barrel buoy,” Daddy said.

John relinquished the tiller to Nancy, then scrambled up to sit on the coaming next to Daddy and look at the chart.

“Aye aye, sir,” Nancy confirmed, eyes flicking to the buoy and the compass. 

John grinned again on hearing Nancy, usually the Captain of her own ship, answering as meekly as any able-seaman. There was silence in the cockpit for a few minutes, as Daddy looked over his chart and Nancy concentrated on steering, doing her best. They passed the black barrel, and Daddy gave the order to alter their course slightly, heading for the next buoy. John, watching him, saw him glance back at their wake and then look at Nancy with approval. 

“Breakfast’s ready!” Peggy called from the cabin, and there was a general scramble to go below.

“Daddy, are you coming?” Bridget called hopefully.

Daddy looked up at John. “Do you think you can navigate for a while? Look here, we’ve just passed this buoy. We’ll see that one next - red with a square top,” he said, pointing on the chart. “Between the two of you I think you should manage. We’ll pass your breakfast up.”

John and Nancy both agreed readily, and Daddy called down the companion steps to Susan, asking her to hand up breakfast for the pair of them. He waited at the top to take two mugs of tea and a plate of bread and marmalade, passing them over to John and Nancy, then went below too, leaving them alone on deck. They were both silent for a bit, hungrily attacking this second half of breakfast. 

“I say, John,” Nancy said suddenly, after swallowing the last of her tea. “I really am awfully sorry about not getting Peewit mapped yesterday - and about leaving you and Susan to pack up everything so Peggy and I could do it this morning.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” John said rather uncomfortably, remembering how angry he’d been with them, and with Titty and Roger, until he’d understood they’d been mapping, not just sailing for fun. “Everything was ready in time, and the map’s done now. Daddy’s pleased with it, too - It was his idea in the first place, you know, and he was pretty fed up when the Admiralty chucked a spanner in the works and he couldn’t come. So I really wanted to get it done for him.”

“I’m glad we finished it then,” said Nancy, with a queer note in her voice. 

John frowned, not able to place that voice at first, though he was sure he’d heard it before. Then he remembered climbing Kanchenjunga a year before, and a note in an old brass box that Nancy hadn’t been able to finish reading aloud. He hesitated, unsure of what to say; and before he could make his mind up, Nancy was speaking again, in her usual cheery tone.

“Shiver my timbers, fine navigators we are! We’re nearly at that buoy. What’s the course from here?”

John hastily turned back to his chart to check and called out a new set of instructions, Nancy altering their course in response. 

“She’s a lovely ship to sail,” she said, hands light on the tiller. “I say, John, what’s that cleat for?”

John looked over. “That one? It’s to hold the tiller line.”

“Oh, I see! To take some of the pull when the wind’s strong?” Nancy asked. “Sounds jolly useful.”

“It was very useful when we got blown out to sea,” John agreed. Nancy really was a sailor, he thought, as he so often did. Of course she’d realise at once what a tiller line was for.

“What was it like sailing to Holland? You haven’t told me about it really. Oh, I know you wrote to us,” Nancy added as John began to protest, “but you just talked about the fog, and the lightships, and not having any charts for the North Sea, and the course you took. You didn’t say anything about what it was _like_. Titty’s the only one who told us a bit about what it was like, but she said she had to lie down with one of those headaches she gets for a good while.”

She was right, John had to acknowledge. He’d done his best with the letter he’d sent to the Amazons, but he knew he wasn’t any good at letter-writing, not really. “It was pretty awful at first,” he said, hesitating, as he tried to work out how to begin, “what with the fog, and losing the anchor, and not being sure what we should do, and Titty and Susan not well… We’d all promised not to go to sea, but it really was the only thing to do.”

“Much better than messing about in the fog between buoys and shoals,” Nancy agreed. “You’d have been sure to hit something.” 

“You’d probably have seen going out was the right thing to do at once, I dithered for a while,” he admitted, looking out at the sunny sea, so different from that stormy night. “I did feel much better once I finally made my mind up, though.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Nancy said. “Being adrift in a fog in a strange place with a ship that wasn’t yours would be enough to make anyone a bit stewy. Remember the fog on the lake last summer? That was pretty bad, and at least we were in _Amazon_ , somewhere we knew and in a dead calm…”

John nodded. “We’d promised Mother we wouldn’t go out, too. That was the worst of it really.”

“She wouldn’t have expected you to keep that promise if it meant risking the _Goblin_ and yourselves,” Nancy said practically. “Your Mother knows more about sailing than that! Didn’t she agree you’d done the right thing once she knew everything? And your Father too?”

“Yes, they did,” John said slowly. He’d still felt a little guilty about that broken promise, despite what Mother and Daddy had said; but hearing Nancy agree with his decision now, some of the guilt was lifted.

“Well, there you are then! Anyway, go on. What about when the fog cleared?”

John took up the tale again, explaining how they’d tried to turn back and found the wind and sea too much for them, so all they could do was go on. He spoke of how he’d gone forward to reef with a lifeline, and that terrifying moment when he’d slipped. 

Hearing that, Nancy looked along the cabin roof, and said, quietly for her, “thank goodness you used a lifeline.”

John nodded. If he’d gone overboard then… With a shiver, he went on to describe another awful moment, of the steamer bearing down on them in the dark, and how they had used a red plate and a torch to show a port light at the very last minute. Then he talked of lighter things - of how he and Susan had sent the crew below to sleep, Nancy’s cheerful laugh ringing out as she reminded him of Titty and Roger being sent to bed during the charcoal-burning earlier that summer, much to their indignation; of how Susan too had fallen asleep in the cockpit at last, leaving him alone in charge of the _Goblin_ . The words that would not come when he’d been trying to put it all on paper flowed easily now, encouraged by Nancy’s grins and exclamations. The shame of losing Jim’s anchor, the worry over the broken promise, that he hadn’t wanted to set down in black and white, were so much easier to tell aloud. The weight and the joy of being responsible for the _Goblin_ and his crew, that he’d struggled to find words to describe, Nancy understood at once.

Just as John was telling how he’d woken, rather ashamed he’d slept at all, with the first light of dawn, Daddy emerged from the cabin again, and John quickly turned back to navigation.

“Hullo the steersmen,” Daddy said, as he joined them in the cockpit. “Where have we got to?” 

John pointed it out on the chart. Daddy shaded his eyes to see the next buoy, and nodded. “Well done, both of you, we’re bang on course. Not far to the river now.”

“I say, it must be John’s turn at the tiller - or someone else’s anyway, I didn’t mean to hog it,” Nancy said.

“You take her, John,” Daddy instructed. “Have you ever read a chart, Captain Nancy?”

“Not a proper one,” Nancy said. “May I have a look?”

John took over the tiller once more, and Nancy scrambled into his place on the coaming and listened to Commander Walker’s explanation. He didn’t have the tiller for long, though - soon the rest were back on deck, and he made way for Peggy, the only one who hadn’t steered the _Goblin_ yet. While Daddy went below with Roger to make sure the engine was in readiness if it should be needed to get them into the river, John climbed up to sit beside Nancy, who was earnestly looking at the chart. 

“Jibbooms and bobstays, but I wish we had further to go!” Nancy said. “I’ll have to get at Uncle Jim about chartering a ship like he’s always said he would, so we can all go to sea together. With all of us, and the Ds too, we could sail a really big one. Too late this summer, even if he weren’t too busy with copper anyway, but it would do for next summer.”

John nodded, already seeing it in his mind’s eye. It would be jolly to all go sailing together in a big ship, spending every night in a different harbour, poring over charts and deciding their course every morning. This summer might be nearly over - and what a summer it had been! - but there was always another summer to come.


End file.
